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It has nothing to do with videos, or homework, or the latest fad in education. It has everything to do with who owns the learning.

No. The thing that I didn’t expect was that my students created flexible groups, depending on what they were working on. They found peers who were working on the same concept they were, so that they could help each other. Sometimes they realized who they couldn’t work with on a particular day, and found a different group of peers to work with instead. And to solidify what my students were learning, we engaged in hands-on activities and labs that actually used the Chemistry concepts they were studying.

Paving informal paths

On paving informal paths, see resources on social and informal learning at Jane Hart’s Social Learning Centre: http://sociallearningcentre.co.uk/ On curation, see Beth Kanter’s blog post “Content Curation 101”: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/ On the Cheesecake Factory’s video café: http://www.bersin.com/News/Details.aspx?id=14676 On communities, see Katja Pastoors’s comparison of types of communities of practice as well as the dynamics of top-down v. bottom-up communities of practice: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1585429 For a study on understanding the workings of a successful community of practice, see Bozarth, J. “The Usefulness of Wenger’s Framework in Understanding an Existing Community of Practice”: http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/4978/1/etd.pdf

Granted, there are no papers to grade, and assignments aren’t free-form, but how does one professor handle so many students? We had four teaching assistants, and my initial plan was that they would spend a lot of time on the discussion forum, answering questions. One night in the early days, I was on the forum at 2 a.m. when I saw a student ask a question, and I was typing my answer when I discovered that another student had typed an answer before I could. It was in the right direction, but not quite there, so I thought I could modify it, but then some other student jumped in with the right answer. It was fascinating to see how quickly students were helping each other. All we had to do was go in and say that it was a good answer. I actually instructed the T.A.’s not to answer so quickly, to let students work for an hour or two, and by and large they find the answers.

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?

EdX operates under an honor code, with no way to verify that the student who registered is the one doing the work. Is that likely to change? It’s quite possible employers would be happy with an honor certificate. We’re looking at various methods of proctoring. We have talked about people going to centers to take exams. There are also companies that use the cameras inside a laptop or iPad to watch you and everything else that’s happening in the room while you take an exam, and that may be more scalable.

As the name suggests, a “hangout” is an informal place, but that doesn’t mean that teaching and learning won’t happen there, of course. And as the show-and-tell on “Ask an Engineer” demonstrates, we’re just beginning to see the innovative ways in which Google+ will be used in educational settings. I asked those who follow me on Google Plus if they’re planning on using Hangouts with their students in the Fall, and it’s clear that we’ll see office hours, collaborative grading sessions, and the like occur via the new video conferencing tool.